5/14 - Maybe it was just a coincidence, maybe not, but Intel chose the week of the Electronic Entertainment Expo to announce the official name of Conroe and Merom, the codenames for its soon-to-be-released next generation desktop and mobile processors.

5/26 - Intel to launch next-gen desktop processor Conroe on 23 July

One might say that this all began with the Pentium 4—ironically, because the P4 is quite different. The P4 for all the abuse that has been heaped upon it lately, remains an important chip. It represents the last in a long line of processors in which clock speed was paramount.

Then a funny thing happened. The Pentium 4 hit a thermal wall. Since clock speeds could no longer be advanced significantly, without resorting to impractical cooling techniques, the race was on to add cores to microprocessors: scaling out, rather than scaling up. Developments like this have only happened once in the history of client-side computing.

5/16 - AMD Unveils Energy Efficient Desktop Processor Roadmap

Then in the Fall of 2005, Intel announced a new microarchitecture for the second half of '06. The new microarchitecture would unite the desktop, mobile, and (x86) server lines under a common infrastructure. The new microarchitecture would be optimized for multi-core.

At the next Intel Developer Forum, a name was given to this microarchitecture. Before, it was simply called Intel's next generation microarchitecture, or Pentium 5, which was more or less logical, since the desktop variant was to succeed the Pentium 4. The name given to it, however, was the Core microarchitecture.

5/19 - Intel to fend off AMD low-power challenge with price cuts of Core Duo

The naming of the new microarchitecture "Core" caused, and continues to cause, confusion throughout the IT community, because Intel had recently named its notebook chips Core—Core Duo and Core Solo, to be precise. The new Core microarchitecture, however, was supposed to be something entirely new. And yet the notebook processors had the same name. So what was up?

The Core microarchitecture is made up of elements of the Pentium M family, the Pentium 4, and elements that don't belong to either. However, the philosophical ideas upon which the Core microarchitecture is primarily based are drawn from the Pentium M. It is for this reason that the new microarchitecture is considered akin to the Pentium M. The "Core microarchitecture extends the energy-efficient philosophy first delivered in Intel's mobile microarchitecture found in the Intel® Pentium® M processor".

The new brand name chosen for Conroe and Merom helps clarify the relationship between Core Duo, Core Solo, and the new Core microarchitecture.

Intel is always full of suprises. When the race was on initially for implementing dual-core, almost everyone thought that Intel's first dual-core processor would be based on a mobile chip, the Pentium M. It ran cooler than the desktop chip, for one. It performed well, for another. It seemed a no brainer for intel to use the Pentium M in its first dual-core chips. Intel, however, surprised almost everyone by releasing a dual-core Pentium 4. This was the 800 and then 900 series of chips, Smithfield and Presler, respectively.

This week, Intel surprised once again. Almost everyone assumed that Merom and Conroe would receive separate brand identities, like the desktop and mobile chips of the past. However, Intel plans to kill two birds with one stone. It shall release two processors, but one name, and that name shall be Core 2 Duo.

Apparently not much separates the desktop chip from the mobile chip—differences in degree, rather than of kind, perhaps. Maybe Intel sees the desktop and mobile segments as converging. Certainly the desktop market is shrinking, and the mobile market is expanding.

The microarchitecture on which the Core 2 processor family is built is designed to be very power-efficient. Laptops have had energy-efficient computing for quite some time now, going all the way back to the first Centrino and Pentium M. Core 2 Duo, however, brings "for the first time the benefits of energy-efficient performance to mainstream desktop computing".

And let's not forget the other brand that was announced this past week. Even though the industry has allegedly ceased chasing raw performance alone, and efficiency instead, Intel nevertheless wants the best of both worlds. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want both the best performance per watt and the best sheer performance imaginable. To this end, the Core 2 Extreme shall succeed the Pentium Extreme Edition, the change in name befitting the change in architecture, while keeping the Extreme moniker, which is largely a marketing device: giving the latest and greatest of everything, at faster speeds, all for $999.

Intel is making some weighty claims for the Core 2 Extreme. One would have thought that Intel had long ago abandoned the gaming field to AMD. The performance of Intel's chips on games lagged so far behind, for so long, that it looked like Intel was not even trying to optimize their processors for gaming, prioritizing instead for business. Lately, however, Intel has began to target dual-core gaming, an incipient market. Now, Intel claims that the Core 2 Extreme "will be the world's fastest processor and the new first choice of gamers and multimedia professionals".

So, the venerable Pentium is coming to an end, to be replaced by upstart Core. The Core 2 brand builds on the Core Duo and Core Solo names. Pentium M, Core Duo, and Core Solo were first generation. Core 2 "signals the arrival of the next generation of technology to the Intel® Core™ processor line".

You have platform brands, and you have processor brands. The processor brands Core and Pentium are converging into Core 2. Core 2, however, shall be used in other platform brands, as well—Centrino, Viiv, and vPro.

Core 2 Extreme shall power some Viiv systems. So not all Viiv boxes shall be small form factor, quiet, and able to fit in an AV rack, but rather state-of-the-art gaming rigs, as well.

Even though the focus is now on performance per watt, the industry nevertheless remains obsessed with clock speeds. People want to know what speeds these chips will run at. There are reports that the new processors start out at 1.6 GHz and that the Core 2 Extreme will come "with a clock speed of 3.33 GHz".

Sequence numbers distinguish the processors, a 4000 and a 6000 series for laptops, 5000 and 7000 for desktops. However, there is no consensus on what the sequence numbers refer to: whether it's front side bus, amount of cache; even the number of cores has been suggested. So we will just have to wait to find out.

As with Core Duo and Core Solo, Core 2 model numbers should include a letter that represents the range of power that the processor consumes. "Current Core processor numbers use the T prefix for 25-49W range, the L prefix for the 15-24W range, and the U prefix for 14W and below. So the new E prefix will be positioned above the T prefix to denote the highest power consumption levels".

While clock speeds of Core 2 will fall below the Pentium 4, Core 2 appears to have as high or higher of a front side bus (FSB) speed than anything that has gone before it. Anticipated FSB speeds range from 667 and 800 MHz for mobile processors to 1333 MHz for server processors and Core 2 Extreme.

In a way, it makes perfect sense to give Merom and Conroe one brand name. They are, after all, based on the same microarchitecture. On the other hand, it makes less sense that Woodcrest, the server variant of the Core microarchitecture, will not carry the Core 2 brand. According to a source, Woodcrest shall retain the Xeon brand and "be named Xeon 5100 series".

Desktop Core 2 is due in July, the mobile version in August. Before then, however, Intel is supposed to release a server platform and a workstation platform, codenamed Bensley and Glidewell, respectively. The server and workstation platforms appear to prepare the way for, but not require, the server version of the Core microarchitecture, Woodcrest. Intel should then release Woodcrest, sometime in the third quarter, possibly even before Core 2.

Woodcrest is a DP (Dual Processor) chip. Quad-core versions of Woodcrest and Core 2 are scheduled for the first quarter of 2007, codenames Clovertown and Kentsfield. A quad-core MP (Multiple Processor) chip is scheduled for 2007, codename Tigerton, but it is to run on a different (Caneland) platform.

So what's next? Core 2 Quadro?